No Coffin for the Corpse

by Clayton Rawson

  Emotions are the damnedest things. Kay was suffering an attack of them now, and my explanations didn’t even get under way.

  “Bank account,” she said, turning. Then she slammed the car door. “You’re alike, both of you! You can’t think of anything but money. As if that were all that—”

  “But Kay,” I started. “Some of us must. You never have because—”

  I didn’t finish. She was gone, running up the steps toward the house. I realized then that Dudley Wolff was, after all, her father, and that defying him as she had just done had been for her a distinctly upsetting emotional experience. Then, when I suddenly seemed to back water and let her down, she folded. I didn’t blame her much.

  I turned toward Wolff and found him grinning at me in a complacent, well-that-settles-your-hash manner that made me boil up and over. He had all the tact of a hippopotamus.

  The Harte family temper let loose with a few fireworks of its own then. Caution went overboard and the applecart tipped completely over.

  “You,” I said flatly, “are a tinhorn Mussolini. How Kay has managed to stick it around here as long as this, I don’t know. She’d be happier on relief. I will marry her now—in spite of hell, high water, and you! Excuse me!”

  I took the steps after Kay three at a time.

  “Harte!” Wolff roared. “If you go through that door I’ll have you arrested for breaking and entering!”

  I didn’t bother to answer.

  As I went in I heard him call to the chauffeur who still waited in the car. “Leonard! Get him! Use gloves if possible. But don’t take any back talk. Get him out of here!”

  He meant it too. I suspected that Leonard had been hired largely on account of the muscular shoulders that bulged beneath his uniform and the slightly cauliflower ear that indicated a belligerent past. He weighed twenty pounds more than I did and had a longer reach. I had no desire to tangle with him.

  There was, as it turned out, no need to. Phillips blocked my way just inside and informed me politely but firmly that Miss Kathryn had retired to her room leaving distinct orders that she was not to be disturbed by anyone. She had, he added, particularly mentioned me. That tore it.

  Leonard strode in through the doorway, an ominous look of anticipation on his capable face. Wolff, at his heels, breathed flame. I knew when I was licked. Without Kay’s moral support there was nothing I could do but retreat as gracefully as possible. Even if I could somehow manage to outmaneuver Leonard, the other hired reinforcements Wolff could call up outnumbered me six to one. If I put up a battle I’d only find myself leaving in a station wagon—one that had the words Police Department lettered on its side.

  I tried to match Wolff’s scowl with one of my own and failed. He had had much more practice.

  “Okay,” I growled. “But I’ll be back.”

  I went out and slammed the door behind me hard. It was a solid affair of heavy oak and it made a quite satisfactory bang. But that wasn’t enough to iron out the wrinkles in my disposition. I slammed the door of my car too, and jabbed my foot furiously against the starter. The car, goaded into too abrupt action, growled; its exhaust roared like Dudley Wolff at his worst and it jerked forward. The gears clashed angrily as I shifted into high.

  I still haven’t the remotest notion how I missed colliding head on with one or another of the line of Lombardy poplars that bordered the winding drive long before I reached the gatehouse. I must have a guardian angel.

  If I do, she didn’t follow through. Perhaps it was when I passed the police car on an upgrade at seventy per that she decided it was more than she could handle. The banshee howl of the siren that rose instantly behind me was enough to scare her off in itself.

  I swore feelingly and pulled over. The officer boarded me, spitting fire in a way that indicated the technique was not exclusive with Dudley Wolff. My disturbed emotional state had apparently shunted too much adrenaline over into the blood stream because I spit some fire right back at him. He promptly deduced that my attitude did not contain nearly enough respect for the majesty of the law. This decision resulted a few moments later in reckless driving and disorderly conduct charges, and a heart-to-heart talk with the desk sergeant at the near-by Mamaroneck police station. I had gained control again by then and tried to exert a belated soothing influence.

  He didn’t soothe easily. It took all my diplomatic skill to induce him to keep the amount of the bond down to the twenty-five I had on me. As for the summons to appear in court Monday morning, that was a subject he flatly refused to discuss under any circumstances, the present ones in particular.

  I realize now that the gift of clairvoyance might have helped. If some occult sixth sense, or perhaps a crystal ball in good working order, had shown me what was happening back in the Wolff mansion, I might have successfully distracted official attention from myself. I could have given the sergeant a report that would have curled his hair—and mine too.

  But I wasn’t psychic. I didn’t find out until nearly two weeks later that, as I argued with the police, one of the persons I had left behind in the Wolff house was busily making the first moves in a cleverly calculated, and completely unique, design for murder.

  Chapter Two:

  The Man Who Hated Death

  WHEN THE POLICE, Merlini, and myself did investigate we eventually obtained the evidence of certain witnesses which enabled us to reconstruct in detail the astonishing series of events that took place just after I left the Wolff house.

  We discovered that, as the door slammed, Dudley Wolff had turned to the chauffeur and said, “All right, Leonard. That’s all.”

  Leonard nodded and went out. The butler took Wolff’s coat and hat.

  “Doctor Haggard and Mr. Galt are waiting for you,” he reported. “In the library.”

  Wolff scowled. “Oh? Haggard too?”

  Phillips nodded. “Yes. He phoned half an hour ago to say that he wanted to see you urgently. When I told him that you were expected shortly, he came over at once. Shouldn’t I have done that, sir?”

  Wolff grunted. “Ummmpf. That’s quite all right, Phillips. Tell Mrs. Wolff I’m here.”

  “Yes, sir. Have you dined?”

  Wolff nodded. He strode toward the tall library doors that opened on the left. He stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “And Phillips,” he added. “When Mr. Harte phones, Kathryn is out, indisposed, or whatever seems to be necessary. If he should return, he is not to be admitted on any account. If you have trouble, get Leonard. That’s a standing order. Understand?”

  Phillips allowed that he did.

  “And bring me something to drink,” Wolff added. “I need it.”

  Storm clouds and the rolling mutter of thunder were everywhere within the Wolff house that night. The tension that existed in the library between the two men who waited there had such a consistently high voltage that the Edison Company might have tapped it as a new source of electric power. Their views on certain fundamental subjects differed as black from white. Neither thought the other’s arguments worth a plugged nickel, and both were completely frank about saying so. A commission of international diplomatic experts would have reported the situation as hopeless.

  The reason for their profound disagreement becomes obvious as soon as you know that Doctor Sydney Haggard was an experimental biologist and that Francis Galt was the director of the American Psychic Research Laboratories. Haggard, thirty-five, brisk, clinically efficient, good-looking, was a strict empiricist. He was a good example of the end result of thorough scientific training—the complete skeptic. If you made a simple conversational observation on the probable state of tomorrow’s weather, he was as likely as not to ask you to supply Weather Bureau findings reduced to mathematical formulas and plotted accurately on graph paper. He wouldn’t be convinced until you had.

  Galt was an older man, lean, quick-moving, somewhat nervous. If, because some of his theories were unfamiliar, you suspected they were made of moonstuff, it was no reason to underestimate the alertness
of the mind that lay behind his owlish round spectacles and sharp gray-green eyes.

  He was an authority in his field too, a field that irked Doctor Haggard because it begins at the precise point where science leaves off. As Galt himself once put it, he rushes in where science fears to tread. He was a man in love with the mysterious and the unknown. Riddles and enigmas, any apparently occult phenomena, fascinated him as long as they remained unexplained. If some commonplace answer was forthcoming, he lost interest.

  The warfare between these two was constant except in Wolff’s presence. They agreed then to a temporary armistice because the millionaire, though he usually loved a scrap, didn’t care for this one. They found it expedient to respect his wishes since they were both indebted to him for underwriting their researches. Patrons having Wolff’s temperament need gentle handling.

  Hostilities ceased as soon as Wolff entered the library. Galt and Haggard both greeted him politely. But the doctor frowned. He noticed at once that Wolff was not exactly in a charitable mood. Angry annoyance, left over from the scene with Kathryn and myself, was still plainly evident in his voice.

  He nodded brusquely at the doctor and said, “Galt is here for the week-end because he said that he had something important to report. As usual, I suspect that means more funds. You’ve evidently got something important to report too. What is it this time? Your need for a newer and bigger centrifuge or another mechanical heart?”

  The startled look in the doctor’s eyes told Wolff that he had hit the mark squarely. He took a fat cigar from a box on the table and ripped off its cellophane wrapper.

  Haggard, not too seriously, said, “Perhaps there is something in Galt’s telepathy after all. That’s just what I do need. Both of them. But I have progress to report also. And it is important.

  Wolff was interested but not exactly enthusiastic. “I’ve heard you say that before. But you’ll have to show me. Sometimes the progress that you consider important—”

  “I know, you want miracles. But a problem like this can’t be licked overnight, not with the apparatus and assistance I have now.”

  Wolff’s scowl and the blue puffs of smoke that he exhaled gave him the appearance of an angry dragon. “The best biological lab in the country outside the Rockefeller Institute, and it’s not enough! All right, and this goes for you too, Galt. Suppose I do give you everything you want? I’m damned impatient. I can’t wait much longer. What guarantee can the two of you give me that you’ll get the results I want?”

  Both men frowned uneasily. Wolff was being even more difficult tonight than usual. He knew as well as they did that no guarantees could be made at all. Haggard, until now, had been confident that he would get what he needed. Being a medical man, he knew why Wolff wanted those results. He had divined what few other people suspected, the fact that beneath his blustering, growling, hard-shelled exterior Dudley Wolff lived in mortal fear. His pyrotechnical outbursts of temper, his devil-take-the-hindmost business methods, even his business of munitions manufacture and his allied hobby of firearm collecting were all nothing more than a deceptive, carefully built-up defense mechanism. The sound-and-fury was a dense smoke screen that had concealed, ever since his first wife’s death at the time of Kay’s birth, a consuming inner fear. Dudley Wolff suffered acutely from an overwhelming inward terror of death.

  This was the psychological mainspring that dictated most of his outward actions. It showed itself in perverse form in his manner, his work, and his hobby. It was also evident in more direct ways. Death, because he stood in frantic fear of it, fascinated him. He was filled with an abnormal curiosity to know what happened after death and tried to satisfy it by endowing the ghostly other-world researches of Francis Galt. He sought for ways and means of avoiding, or at least postponing, the inevitable by assisting the longevity experiments that were Doctor Haggard’s chief interest.

  Wolff pointed his cigar at Galt’s lean, thick-spectacled face. “I gave you a psychic laboratory better equipped than Harry Price’s in London. You have all the gadgets and the best obtainable technical assistance. But what have you got to show for it? You’ve exposed several dozen fraudulent mediums, investigated a score of haunted houses, and secured some very interesting photographs of the human aura which have nothing to do with the case. You’ve found a handful of psychics whose phenomena you can’t explain—not coherently anyway. And you’ve amassed several filing cases of data on hyperesthesia, telekinesis, and the various forms of trance state. But it doesn’t add up. I still don’t know what happens when a person dies. Nearly all your evidence on that point is damned contradictory. I’m convinced that something happens. It has to. But I don’t know much more about it than Doctor Haggard here does.”

  The doctor took one of the drinks which the butler offered. “I know nothing about it at all,” he said. “I strongly suspect there isn’t anything to know. You’re looking for evidence you can’t find because it isn’t there. Life is a physicochemical process and nothing more. When you throw in metaphysics, it’s pure wishful thinking.”

  Galt growled irritably. “I have found evidence,” he contradicted. “Good evidence. But you won’t admit that—”

  “What evidence?” Wolff cut in.

  “The Zugun and the Garrett cases. They’re sound enough and they certainly appear to indicate—”

  “Indicate!” Wolff snorted. “Indicate, yes. But that’s not enough!” He brought his fist down on the table. “I want proof!” He pointed his cigar at Haggard again, handling it as if it were a deadly and loaded weapon. “As for you, you’re like all the rest of the science boys. You’re an authority in your own specialized field. And the rest of the time you know just about enough to come in out of the rain. You dismiss the whole subject of psychic research as medieval nonsense without ever having bothered to take a quick look at it close up. The scientific attitude! If that’s a sample—”

  “But your psychics,” Haggard objected, knowing that argument with Wolff was distinctly not recommended, but unable to resist, “they all turn out to be frauds eventually, quacks of the worst sort who want money or notoriety or both.”

  Francis Galt wasn’t going to let that one pass. His eyes flashed dangerously behind his thick spectacles. “That’s not true! There are and have been many mediums who didn’t need money, who didn’t want, even avoided publicity, who—”

  “I’ll bet they got it though,” Haggard insisted. “And suppose that there is an honest, sincere medium now and then. I can explain that. They’re psychopathic cases, victims of hallucination who deceive themselves as well as the investigators. A little thoroughgoing medical or psychiatric treatment in the right places would lay a lot of ghosts.”

  “What about Lodge, Flammarion, Professor Zöllner?” Galt asked hotly. “Are you saying that investigators of that caliber were hoodwinked by mental cases?”

  Haggard, noting Wolff’s stormy expression, wished that he hadn’t started this. But he stuck to his guns. “I’m afraid so,” he insisted. “They were bamboozled. Conan Doyle too. Lodge was emotionally upset by the death of his son, and they were all operating under the handicap of age, their powers of accurate observation, their logical faculties impaired. The structural degeneration of nervous cells due to senescence is—”

  Galt, in his late fifties and a good score of years older than Haggard, took this as a personal thrust. “And you,” he said acidly, “couldn’t be fooled, I suppose?”

  Haggard shook his head. “I won’t say that. Thurston used to mystify me when he apparently sawed a lady in two. But I never tried very seriously to dope it out. It was entertainment. Knowing how would spoil it. Besides, since it was admitted trickery, puzzling it out is not worth the effort.”

  “You’re confident that you could figure out something like that though?”

  Haggard smiled. “Well, it shouldn’t be nearly as difficult as trying to chart the growth processes of somatic cells in culture or tracking an enzyme to its lair.”

  Galt smiled too. �
�You’re in for an unpleasant surprise one of these days,” he predicted. “Nature’s only mystery is her complexity. She isn’t trying to deceive you consciously as magicians or as some mediums do. It’s a big difference. A trick fools you because it utilizes some very simple laws of deception—operating principles that treacherously double-cross your logic. The more experienced a logician you are, the more formal are your thought patterns, the easier they are to short-circuit, and the harder you fall. Children, unused to formal logic, not scientists, are the magician’s most difficult audiences. You’re skeptical. Then listen!”

  Galt leaned forward in his chair and placed his finger tips lightly on the table. The doctor and Wolff both heard the sound almost at once, a low rapping noise as of ghostly knuckles against wood. It had no visible source. Low at first, it came repeatedly, steady and louder.

  “You’re so damned logical,” Galt challenged. “Explain that. It’s trickery.”

  Haggard obviously was puzzled, but he didn’t let it disturb him greatly. “I’ll take your word for it, Galt. But, if I had you in my laboratory and if you repeated that to order under strict test conditions, I’d soon know the answer. However, I have more important things to do than—”

  “Yes,” Dudley Wolff broke in heavily. “You do. Stop arguing with him, Galt. You’re right. He’d get himself a lovely headache trying to solve that one with his test tubes and galvanometers. It took us six months to find out how Kramer did it.”

  Wolff turned to the doctor. “You mentioned old age a moment ago. You’ve been promising you’d do something about that. Theoretically there’s no reason a man cannot extend his life span far beyond its present limits. Parrots, some of them, reach ages of a hundred years and more; reptiles like the tortoise nearly two hundred; and some species of fishes outlive them by sixty to seventy years. Sequoia trees reach three thousand, and without showing any evidence of senile changes in tissue. Unicellular life, barring accident, is to all intents and purposes immortal. There is no convincing evidence that living tissue needs to die. But when are you going to stop working on rats, cats, and dogs and show me—”